Nine Areas That Will Be in Demand During 2012

Computerworld’s annual Forecast survey of 353 IT executives finds a 45 percent increase in hiring expectations over the past two years, but the most important information to come out of the study is the list of skills that they need the most going forward. Here are the top nine:

Programming and Application Development: 61% plan to hire for this skill in the next 12 months.

Project Management: 44 percent plan to hire.

Help Desk/Technical Support: 35 percent plan to hire.

Networking: 35 percent plan to hire.

Business Intelligence: 23 percent plan to hire.

Data Center: 18 percent plan to hire.

Web 2.0: 18 percent plan to hire.

Security: 17 percent plan to hire.

Telecommunications: 9 percent plan to hire.

The biggest surprise may be that security is so low, and is actually trending down from a 32 percent plan-to-hire last year. Why a bit of mystery given how prevalent cybersecurity issues have become in recent years.

Maybe I’m missing something here, but it seems to me that most of these 9 items are not exactly ‘skills’. For example ‘Data Center’ is not a skill, and ‘Programming and Application Development’ encompasses most of a Computer Science degree. I realize that this is intended as a summary, but the 9 listed items are broad, general categories.

To elaborate just a bit with an example, in the area of ‘Programming and Application Development’, a few of the actual skills required might include the following: proficient use of specific programming languages such as ‘C’, C++, or Java; experience in database schema design and use of SQL, or experience using Eclipse.

While it’s very helpful to know that these are areas where demand will exist in 2012, it would be more informative to either refer to them as general categories or areas, or elaborate on the actual skills within these areas that might be in demand.